On January 15, 2013, the Curiosity Rover tweeted, “With a thumbs up from the engineers, this light-veined rock will be my 1st drill target on Mars.”
The Mars rover Curiosity landed on Mars on August 6, 2012, in a revolutionary attempt to explore the foreign terrain. The main goal of the project is to determine whether or not the planet was ever capable of supporting life.
This month, the car-sized robot will be drilling into a piece of Martian rock for the first time. Curiosity is currently in the Gale Crater, a location on Mars with unique features in the landscape that suggest that water once ran across its surface.
Mars Science Laboratory project manager Richard Cook says that “Drilling into a rock to collect a sample will be this mission’s most challenging activity since the landing. It has never been done on Mars.”
However, team members are optimistic about the results of the drilling, if successful. The area is riddled with “fractures and vein fills,” and contains high levels of calcium, sulfur, and hydrogen, characteristics that typically suggest evidence of water.
Most scientists agree that the currently bare planet once had water on its surface. But they are only just beginning to understand what the terrain might have looked like. The more humans learn about the bodies of water that existed on Mars (for example, running streams and still lakes), the closer humans will come to determining if Mars had ever been habitable.
The Curiosity team is confident that a river or stream once flowed close to the current drilling site. But according to Mars Science Laboratory project scientist John Grotzinger, “This area [Yellowknife Bay, the lowest point of the Gale Crater] had a different type of wet environment than the streambed where we landed, maybe a few different types of wet environments.”
This newest advancement for the rover may prove to be a revolutionary one when it comes to our understanding of Mars, long considered to be the closest thing Earth has to a “twin.”
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/msl/news/msl20130115.html
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2013/130115-curiosity-mars-drill-water-space-science/
https://twitter.com/intent/user?screen_name=MarsCuriosity
http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl/multimedia/interactives/learncuriosity/index-2.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/06/science/space/curiosity-rover-lands-safely-on-mars.html?_r=0